Microsoft Dynamic IT strategy blurs .NET boundaries and attacks BI market

Microsoft unveiled its Dynamic IT strategy this week, which extends the vendor’s earlier Dynamic Systems Initiative to include better development support for web services.

“This is a kind of next generation .NET, though .NET has not changed – it is a broader vision into which .NET fits,” explained the head of Microsoft's UK server business, Bruce Lynn.

“We felt that the dynamic systems initiative was very operational centric, whereas a lot of what we are investing in is development centric.”

The first public beta of .NET Framework 3.5 and a CTP of BizTalk Services, also announced at this week’s TechEd conference, are intended to support Dynamic IT, which is built on service orientated architecture (SOA), web based applications and the vendor’s own take on software as a service (Saas), Software plus Services (S+S).

A beta of Microsoft’s latest S+S application, Silverlight Streaming, a free hosting service for developers creating rich-media content using Microsoft Expression Studio tools was also previewed at TechEd.

The company also said that it will deliver release 2 (R2) of its BizTalk Server 2006 business process management product in the third quarter of this year. It will include RFID and EDI support, and improved integration with the .NET Framework 3.0, Office 2007 and Vista.

Part of the Dynamic IT strategy will also focus on integrating business intelligence (BI) tools into Microsoft products, capabilities that would previously have been provided by separate BI solutions.

“BI was previously an add-on and an extra cost, but if the software has Microsoft on the label it will have BI hooks and core capabilities built in,” said Lynn.

“If you want to know the status of a particular process, of how many instances of a process, you can capture that information whilst the system is running, for instance.”